Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated by James P. Smythe
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page 8 of 230 (03%)
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palace and put the women under arrest. The pent-up Revolution at last
had burst--anarchy howled around the capital--the isolated Czar was captive, and plotting princelings joined hands with puny lawyers to browbeat courageous women and drive the chariot of State! The miserable fiasco of a delirious Revolution went careering through the giddy maze of treachery and madness until a frenzied wave of rapine and disorder swept all the noblewomen of the Imperial household into a barricaded fortress around which lust and inebriety held unsated and remorseless vigil for the prize. (See Part II: Tumen.) Among these prisoners of State were five women who realized that the Power which had organized disorder as a feature of its military strategy had also honeycombed the Army, the Navy and the State with its agencies of pillage and so undermined the public conscience that their purity and virtue, more than their jewels and fortune, became an open challenge to the vanity of mob lust. The younger of these women in their unsullied maidenhood looked longingly and unsuspectingly in the direction of Siberia. They were learning by degrees that the semblance of freedom which offered a pathway to escape was nothing but a strategem employed by pretended friends to entrap them into more cruel and ruthless hands. On every side loomed the evidence of their danger. The villainous stares of foreign interlopers, the ribald jests of guards, the furtive glances of the envious, the scowls of the emancipated underling, the profanity of the domineering agitator who denounced respectability and clamored for possession of the girls,--no moment of their lives was free from ugly threats; no retreat, save the wild jungle or the mountains, offered any liberation from the immodest glare of cruel, licentious |
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